An illuminating portrait of the 25-year-old woman who led England through religious and political crises with diplomacy,...
Ronald (The Pirate Queen: Queen Elizabeth I, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire, 2007, etc.) imparts her vast understanding of the queen who tried to establish religious tolerance in her kingdom.
The 1558 Acts of Supremacy and Settlement established Elizabeth as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England and revived the statutes that allowed both Protestant and Catholic communion. Ronald’s premise that Elizabeth never intended to marry illustrates how well the queen mastered political gaming; she ingeniously used her marriage card to play the European leaders against each other. Those countries also struggled with religious conflict. Catholic France’s attempts to deal with the Huguenots failed miserably, and Rome supported the Irish as they attempted to expel the English. The Spanish King Philip II suffered religious civil wars in the Netherlands, which not only ruined Spain’s commerce, but also forced them into bankruptcy multiple times. The Low Countries readily accepted the Catholic scholars who deserted Oxford for the safety of their Universities of Louvain and Douai. Elizabeth, never one to miss an opportunity, insisted on the expulsion of those scholars before trade could be resumed after their civil wars. While Elizabeth may have agreed to expel the Dutch rebels in England in return, when the time came, she conveniently forgot. The author calls Elizabeth a heretic due to Pope Pius V’s excommunication in 1570. However, since the members of the Church of England did not support the pope, neither she nor her supporters ever recognized the act.
An illuminating portrait of the 25-year-old woman who led England through religious and political crises with diplomacy, vision and pure force of will.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-64538-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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